I became interested units of measure when, quite a while ago, I read a book by Professor Alexander Thom, the man who discovered the megalithic yard. This bright Scottish Professor suspected that the megalithic stone circles strewn across the British Isles and Northern France were probably arranged in some measured way. By surveying many of them he eventually deduced the unit of measure to be 2.72 feet, which he promptly named the megalithic yard. Sadly, it had been forgotten, discarded in the landfill of history when people ceased to care much where the sun rose on the solstices.

The megalithic yard was probably eclipsed by the much more popular cubit, which is also a bit passé. The cubit dates back to Ancient Egypt and the Pharaohs, who also were inclined to build more impressive stuff. It is believed to represent the approximate length of someone’s forearm, because the Egyptian hieroglyph for cubit shows a forearm. If so, then Ancient Egyptian forearms were 20.6 inches in length. The Egyptian’s were trendsetters in Ancient times, and pretty soon everyone had their own cubit; the Romans, the Greeks, the Jews, the Babylonians and the even early Mesopotamians. Each such cubit was a different length. This must have made life difficult for international builders, shipwrights and cloth traders in ancient times – as in; “When I said I wanted my trireme 100 cubits long, I meant Egyptian cubits, you idiot”

The origin of the modern yard is not known for sure, although it is suspiciously close to 2 cubits (not Egyptian cubits, you idiot, Roman cubits). The British Standard Yard was eventually defined as being the length of an official yardstick that was kept in the UK’s Houses of Parliament. It burnt up when the Houses of Parliament burnt down in 1834, so it was replaced by a more scientific measure derived from the swinging of a pendulum held in a temperature-compensated environment, in a vacuum, at sea level, in Greenwich – the place that’s famous for its mean time. The British yard was eventually usurped by the French metre, with the Brits finally caving in and adopting it 1964.

Just as there is a story behind the yard, there is a story behind every unit of measure. Here are ten that you may not have heard:

1. Jigget. If you ever learned French, you’ll know that the French can’t count properly. They do OK on the small numbers and then they go completely weird once they get above 60 (soixante) and when they get to 80 (quatre-vingt) it’s clear that they’ve lost it completely. There are two explanations for this:

• When a Frenchman reaches the number soixante-neuf, being French, he gets completely distracted and forgets how to count properly. Thus there is no septante, huitante or nonante. Just soixante-dix, quatre-vingt and quatre-vingt-dix. This theory is made all the more plausible by the fact that, in Switzerland, those numbers are, as they should be, septante, huitante or nonante.
• An alternative explanation for the irregularity is that the French counting method is influenced by sheep counting.

Jigget is the number 20 in many sheep counting systems and it means “20 sheep”. OK. Maybe you didn’t know that there were sheep counting systems, but there are a surprising number of them. Seventeen different ones are known from different parts of England, including one each for most of the Yorkshire Dales. There are others throughout the Ancient Celtic region (Ireland, Wales, Scotland and Northern France) and there were even two discovered in the US, in the Cincinnati area and in Vermont.

The way the system works is that the shepherd herds his flock through a narrow gate at the end of the day, and counts the sheep one-by-one in 20s. He has a pocket full of pebbles and another pocket empty, and for every 20 sheep counted he shifts a pebble from one pocket to another. If he comes from Swaledale in Yorkshire, these are the 20 numbers he uses:

• Yan, Tan, Tether, Mether, Pip,
• Azer, Sezar, Akker, Conta, Dick,
• Yanadick, Tanadick, Tetheradick, Metheradick, Bumfit,
• Yanabum, Tanabum, Tetherabum, Metherabum, Jigget

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